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Teju Cole Puts Story-Telling to the Twitter Test

By David Vecsey January 9, 2014 4:03 pmJanuary 9, 2014 4:03 pm

6:50 p.m. | Update:Teju Cole, who is in India, responded to my email after this post originally went live. His comments were added later.

When the merits of Twitter are debated, one sentiment invariably is at the top of the con column: 140 characters are seldom enough to express the full weight of an idea. Or at least an idea that’s worth expressing.

People have found ways around this: conjoined tweets, live-tweeting, etc. … The novelist Teju Cole expanded on this theme on Wednesday, when he posted an entire short story via tweet. Yes, that has been done before. But Cole’s project was different, because the individual tweets were posted not by him, but by his followers, and then @TejuCole retweeted them in chronological order to form a sort of quilted story.

“My story, which had the (unannounced) title of ‘Hafiz,’ is a creative cousin to works like Shelley Jackson’s ‘Skin,’ a 2,095-word story that was told one tattooed word at a time on the bodies of 2,095 volunteers,” Cole wrote in an email, “and Janet Cardiff’s ’40 Part Motet,’ an audio installation of Thomas Tallis’s tremendous 1570 composition ‘Spem in Alium,’ for 40 standing audio speakers. But I went for this new device, the retweet.
“I was fascinated by how clean a retweet can be, how you can make someone else present on your timeline. This is usually a cause for anxiety (an anxiety people express with the plea “retweets are not endorsements”), but I thought it could also be an occasion for grace, for doing something unusual together. ‘Hafiz’ was a small attempt to put a number of people into a collaborative situation, to create a ‘we’ out of a story I might simply have published in the conventional way.”

Yes, in some ways this is nothing more than the old party game in which a blank sheet of paper is set out for anybody to add a single line to an evolving story (although Cole wrote the whole story and simply doled out the individual tweets for his followers). But Cole’s version of the game was effective in a strange, new way: If you happened to follow any of the selected participants on Twitter (but not necessarily Cole), you would have seen only a single contribution to the story — an oddly out-of-place, out-of-context nugget, even by Twitter standards.

This is exactly what happened to me when I saw a tweet from the comic Rob Delaney, who is known for his wildly absurd and sometimes wildly vulgar humor. @RobDelaney’s tweet read:

Why tears? Because light is beautiful. Because we do not wish to leave something and stray away into nothing.

As I said, many of Delaney’s tweets are completely insane. But this one stood out to me as, dare I say, rather pretty and unusual. At first I assumed that he was just throwing his followers a curveball. But as the day wore on, I kept running that line through my head, like, “Really?” (Several of Delaney’s followers suggested that he had been hacked.) So when I finally started poking around, I came across the work in full on Cole’s feed. I leaned back in my chair and reveled at having been an unwitting guinea pig.

Genius. A siren song. A disparate string of sentences amid a great ocean of disparate strings of sentences. Yet if one of those sentences happened to sink its hooks into you, as Delaney’s did to me, it led you to a collective whole, an island of context in Twitter’s vast chaotic sea.

Here is the story in full (in reverse tweet order):

. . . to the subway, I saw a man on the ground. He sat on the sidewalk, under trees, with his feet out to the quiet street.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…